Eloise Parry: Mother's shock over killer dealer's appeal bid
The mother of a student killed by illegal toxic diet pills has spoken of her shock at discovering the man jailed for selling the drugs is appealing his conviction.
Fiona Parry, whose 21-year-old daughter Eloise died in 2015 after buying toxic diet pills online, said she thought her family had been able to draw a line under the matter when Bernard Rebelo was convicted last year.
Rebelo, from Gosport, who was jailed for seven years, will be appealing his conviction for two counts of manslaughter and one of placing unsafe food on the market at the Court of Appeal tomorrow.
Rebelo was sentenced at Inner London Crown Court in June last year.
The trial had heard how Eloise, from Shrewsbury, had died after taking eight tablets containing the poisonous 2,4-dinitrophenol (DNP).
Miss Parry, from Condover, said the news of Rebelo’s appeal came as a shock.
“I thought at the end of the trial last summer we had drawn a line under the matter, and to have to revisit the matter again is daunting,” she said.
“I have no idea what the outcome will be, but there’s nothing we can do about it.” Miss Parry said she would be attending court.
She said she was concerned that Eloise’s sister Rebecca might be called to give evidence again in the event of a retrial.
She said: “The idea that we have got to go back and relive this is not ideal.
"The idea there might be a retrial we have to go through is traumatic, and Rebecca being called as a witness, she found that very hard. The idea that she might have to go through that again, preparing a witness statement, it’s daunting.
“We really don’t want to revisit that again in public, but that is potentially what could happen.”
When Judge Jeremy Donne sentenced Rebelo he described Eloise as an “intelligent, articulate young woman who struggled with her mental health”.
He told Rebelo: “She thought she had found in your so-called fat-burning capsules a magic solution for her distorted body-image and difficulties with bulimia nerviosa.
“She was of course quite wrong.”
The judge said Rebelo had shown “no remorse at all” for causing her death.
“You indiscriminately supplied DNP, a highly toxic industrial chemical, via the internet,” he added.
“You had no way of controlling who would purchase it, and it was highly likely that those with eating disorders – possibly even the very young and impressionable – would buy it.”
